Before joining Perform Green as a consultant, I was working with SMEs, building, and selling technological services to digitalise their key operational processes like procurement. What became clear to me was the fact that the pandemic did not just accelerate the adoption of digital channels to manage remotely working employees but that rapid digital transformation created entirely new business cases and business models. SMEs with their resource constraints were not popularly known to be smart production sites, often limiting their adoption of technology to marketing, or invoicing but the pandemic has, dare I say, brought in a paradigm shift. As an old Chinese proverb goes – When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills. It would be safe to say that, for the SMEs, a chunk that makes almost over 90% of the UK economy, pushed by the accelerated pace of digital change driven by the pandemic, has gone beyond digital readiness and adoption to, investments in new digital capabilities and innovation by either automating or outsourcing operational functions.
‘Digital Transformation’, the remit, once perceived to be feasible mostly in the hallowed halls of big corporations with deeper pockets – now had a more democratic scope.
This was enabled by the combined forces of an increased availability of function-centric, affordable technological solutions in the market, advocacy and policy recommendations focused on sustainability – like the Procurement Policy (PPN 06) and G-Cloud of the UK Government, that required SMEs to evidence carbon reduction and social value plans when bidding for a government tender as a commercial supplier. It quickly became clear that SMEs, by virtue of their design were already doing a lot of good – smaller teams, stronger shared values, more control, and oversight of their supply chains with little or no legacy friction – were well positioned for the modern corporate/public sector partnership. However, they required the means to map, track and report that impact. Start-ups providing technological solutions tuned in to cater to this significant chunk of customer base turning their white-label solutions to subscription-based models, more affordable to first-time adopters with weaker internal capabilities looking to minimise cost grounds. Entirely new value propositions, digital solutions, emerged, like whatimpact.com that builds dashboards enabling companies to capture/consolidate multiple sources of data, measure, report their social value for public tenders and investors. SMEs today have more cost effective and customisable technological solutions to make the transition to digitalise their systems.
Cross border trade flows with Europe have pushed emerging countries like India to create an omnibus of data security laws interoperable with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that could enable more secured cross border trade – strategic partnerships with smaller and medium sized, innovation centred enterprises.
Due to the pandemic, in just 2 years, emerging economies saw an acceleration of digital adoption by over 10 years (vs 7 years in the developed economies) which had a favourable effect in democracies like India with a strong history of social activism. Governments weren’t simply pushed to revise legal frameworks by outraged data privacy advocates, but a whole new ecosystem of ‘non tech’ players framed the digital transformation agenda towards public good: the ODE (Open Digital Ecosystems) initiative is modelled on strategic engagement with ‘community’ players, like open-source technologists, SMEs, start-ups and civil society to foster digital trust and design technology that incorporates best practises of modularity, open API, open sourced and equitable interoperability. The mix of stakeholders have strengthened data privacy laws in these countries and fostered digital trust across value chains.
It has become somewhat fashionable to state the failure rates of Digital Transformation, when in fact, the pandemic has contributed to expanding its scope, with more SME inclusion and bringing user/customer rights questions to the forefront. Digital Transformation, if seen for what it really is – harnessing the power of the digital to drive business value, is at an interesting juncture today, with regulatory reforms and capital driving products that would help businesses of all sizes to harness the power of the digital solutions to drive value. It is not the time for SMEs to ditch their digital transformation agendas but to be bolder in designing their digital strategy and identifying the right technological solutions that would boost their digital transformation transition.
Follow us on twitter and Linkedin for new Articles in our series on Insight to Innovation, Successful Innovation, Advanced Connectivity Enablement and Creating a Green and Smart Society.
